Lower Cape towns consider media center after Comcast exit

Friday

Aug 24, 2007 at 2:00 AM

ORLEANS — Lower Cape town officials are looking for a possible new studio for Channel 17, their public-access channel that broadcasts everything from school sports and town meetings to talk shows and local concerts.

SUSAN MILTON

ORLEANS — Lower Cape town officials are looking for a possible new studio for Channel 17, their public-access channel that broadcasts everything from school sports and town meetings to talk shows and local concerts.

Comcast wants to bow out of direct operation of the public-access channel for Brewster, Orleans, Eastham, Wellfleet, Truro and Provincetown.

The cable company "doesn't want to run the studio anymore," Town Administrator John Kelly said this week. "But our franchise agreements require Comcast to man it and run it. We need to decide how to proceed with that."

Comcast now is the cable television provider to all Cape towns and an estimated 117,000 customers. Previously, different companies served different regions of the Cape and public access has varied under the licenses negotiated separately by each town.

One solution for the Lower Cape is for the six towns to join five other Cape towns that use the nonprofit Cape Cod Community Media Center on White's Path in South Yarmouth.

That was the approach recommended in a June 24 report from a working group of cable advisory committee members from each town. The report said starting a new nonprofit public-access company would be risky and more costly. The existing studio equipment is obsolete and in poor condition and Comcast will not lease the existing Orleans studio to the next operator, it said.

"We're growing as a company and we need the room," Comcast spokesman Jim Hughes said this week.

But the South Yarmouth media center is interested and willing to create a regional studio in one of the Lower Cape towns.

On Aug. 9, officials from all six towns gathered to discuss the report and "we're now waiting for more information to come back," Kelly said.

Public-access channels are threatened nationally, supporters say, as cable television and telephone companies seek a less-regulated way to do business. Cable operators such as Verizon and Comcast want federal and state legislation to change the licensing process so they can avoid negotiating town by town. .

"The fear among those of us who support cable TV is that, without those individual deals, what will happen to those public-access stations?" State Rep. Jeffrey Perry, R-Sandwich, said. The federal licensing law died in committee and nothing's happened yet with the Massachusetts legislation, Perry said.